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| ACTIVISMS [Dorothy Hodgson & Ethel C Brooks (eds)] Focusing on the global south, international contributors explore women's activism around social and political issues. Contributors from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and more explore social justice and gender equality, particularly in the global south. The issue includes photo-essays about US and South African performance art, an interview with renowned feminist activist Charlotte Bunch, and a discussion forum on Mary Wollstonecraft. Articles and fiction examine how art, humour, protests, detective novels, and transnational networks promote progressive agendas. { 343pp, 155x230mm, December 2007; PB, £14.99, 1558615660:9781558615663 , Feminist Press } |
| CANADIAN CULTURAL EXCHANGE / ÉCHANGES CULTURELS AU CANADA : Translation & Transculturation / traduction et transculturation [Norman Cheadle & Lucien Pelletier (eds)] Text in French & English. These essays provide a nuanced view of Canadian transcultural experience. Rather than considering Canada as a bicultural dichotomy of coloniser/colonised, this book examines a field of many cultures and the creative interactions among them. This comprehensive study discusses Canadian cultural space as being in process of continual translation of both the other and oneself. { 400pp, 155x230mm, July 2007; HB, £49.99, 0889205191:9780889205192 , Wilfrid Laurier University Press } |
| CROSS-CULTURAL PROTECTION OF NATURE & THE ENVIRONMENT [Finn Arler & Ingeborg Svennevig (eds)] Over the last few decades, various international and cross-cultural partnerships have been established, often with impressive speed, to facilitate the protection of natural resources and the environment. However, many problems exist within these partnerships: international declarations and conventions are not binding in the same ways as national laws; the motivations behind the involvement of a country or culture are not always easy to identify and are often understood differently in different places; environmental obligations are often interpreted and implemented differently in different places; and common aims are often not mutual at all. These difficulties surrounding the establishment and implementation of workable international and cross-cultural environmental policies form the basis of this book. { 248pp, 180x260mm, January 1998; PB, £23.50, 8778383471:9788778383471 , University Press of Southern Denmark (Odense University Press) } |
| CULTURE & CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST [Philip Carl Salzman] In an era of increasing interaction between the United States and the countries of the Middle East, it has become ever more important for Americans to understand the social forces that shape Middle Eastern cultures. Based on years of his own field research and the ethnographic reports of other scholars, anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman presents an incisive analysis of Middle Eastern culture that goes a long way toward explaining the gulf between Western and Middle Eastern cultural perspectives. Salzman focuses on two basic principles of tribal organisation that have become central principles of Middle Eastern life -- balanced opposition (each group of whatever size and scope is opposed by a group of equal size and scope) and affiliation solidarity (always support those closer against those more distant). On the positive side, these pervasive structural principles support a decentralised social and political system based upon individual independence, autonomy, liberty, equality, and responsibility. But on the negative side, Salzman notes a pattern of contingent partisan loyalties, which results in an inbred orientation favouring particularism: an attitude of my tribe against the other tribe, my ethnic group against the different ethnic group, my religious community against another religious community. For each affiliation, there is always an enemy. Salzman argues that the particularism of Middle Eastern culture precludes universalism, rule of law, and constitutionalism, which all involve the measuring of actions against general criteria, irrespective of the affiliation of the particular actors. The result of this relentless partisan framework of thought has been the apparently unending conflict, both internal and external, that characterises the modern Middle East. REVIEW: "While tribalism is in one sense culturally pervasive in the Middle East, tribal practices are less swathed in sacredness than explicitly Koranic symbols and commandments--and are therefore more susceptible to criticism and debate. Even jihad and suicide bombing can be interpreted through a tribal lens. We've taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change. The way to begin is by picking up Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East." -- Stanley Kurtz, Weekly Standard, 14th April 2008. { 224pp, 155x230mm, December 2007; HB, £23.50, 1591025877:9781591025870 , Prometheus Books (Humanity Books) } |
| ETHNOLOGIA EUROPAEA, VOLUMES 35/1 & 35/2 : Journal of European Ethnology [Orvar Löfgren & Richard Wilk (eds)] Ethnologia Europaea has set itself the task of breaking down not only the barriers which divided research into Europe from general ethnology, but also the barriers between the various national schools within the continent. With this manifesto Ethnologia Europaea was started in 1969. Since then, it has acquired a central position in the international co-operation between ethnologists in the various European countries, in the East as well as the West. It is, however, a journal of topical interest, not only for ethnologists, but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. { 164pp, 180x260mm, November 2006; PB, £22.00, 8763505118:9788763505116 , Museum Tusculanum Press } |
| GIVEN -- 1° ART 2° CRIME : Modernity, Murder & Mass Culture [Jean-Michel Rabaté; John Schad, Series Editor] Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp’s fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, ‘Etant Donnés’, and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder; Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting ‘the scene of the crime’; and Ralph Roff’s 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective’s outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe. { 228pp, 152x229mm, September 2006; HB, £47.50, 1845191110:9781845191115 / PB, £16.95, 1845191129:9781845191122 , Sussex Academic Press } |
| GOTHIC NZ : The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture [Misha Kavka, Jennifer Lawn & Mary Paul (eds)] Contemporary creative writers, intellectuals, photographers, painters and other artists have all contributed to this volume exploring the idea of 'gothic' in New Zealand culture. From Martin Edmond's abandoned houses, to Ian Lochhead's Victorian corrugated iron structures, to Otis Frizzell's tattoos, from Peter Jackson's movie-making to ghost paintings -- there's plenty of it. As the editors suggest, gothic is 'endemic to New Zealand's self-representation'. { 176pp, 170x240mm, October 2006; PB, £17.99, 1877372234:9781877372230 , University of Otago Press } |
| INDIAN SETTLERS : The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community [Jacqueline Leckie] Indians have been present in New Zealand for over a hundred years, yet few New Zealanders would know their story. Who were these people, where did they come from, and what role have they played in the making of Aotearoa as it is in the twenty-first century? This book seeks to provide some answers. { 204pp, 200x265mm, October 2007; HB, £24.50, 1877372501:9781877372506 , University of Otago Press } |
| LANDSCAPE AS WORLD PICTURE : Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images [Jacob Wamberg] This book presents a new and comprehensive bid concerning the manner in which landscapes in Western pictorial art may be interpreted in relation to the cultures that created them. Its point of departure is a hitherto unexplored development pattern that characterises landscape representation from Paleolithic cave paintings through to 19th century modernity. Through a structuralist comparison between this pattern and three additional fields of analysis -- self consciousness, socially determined perception of nature, and world picture -- a fascinating insight into culture's macro-historic organisation is extrapolated. Not least it is argued controversially that culture at a certain level of observation is marked by a directional evolution. The gradual accentuation of a viewpoint found in landscape images can, in this way, be read as a sign of how self consciousness -- the notion of an 'I' detached from nature -- develops. And, in the raw rocky terrain and vividly coloured skies that are introduced in ancient and medieval landscape images, there is testimony of how cosmos splits into a chaotic Mother Earth and an indestructible masculine sky. Finally, the book demonstrates that the landscape images' incorporation or exclusion of traces of cultivation (e.g. fields, roads, hedges), is dependent on what the powers-that-be think about physical work. { ca900pp, August 2008; HB, £45.95, 8779342329:9788779342323 , Aarhus University Press } |
| MONTANA 1911 : A Professor & His Wife Among the Blackfeet [Mary Eggermont-Molenaar] This is the complete text diary kept by Mrs W M Uhlenbeck-Melchoir while accompanying her husband, the Dutch anthropologist/linguist, Dr C C Uhlenbeck, during his fieldwork on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in the summer of 1911. Here eyewitness account of their three-month stay gives the reader a fascinating insight into the world of the Blackfeet. The first edition ever to be translated into English, this book is complete with notes, introductions, & supplementary materials. The book includes essays on Blackfeet mythology & folklore that detail life before the reservation period & a biographical sketch of the Uhlenbecks, featuring aspects of C C Uhlenbeck's career as a linguist & scholar, as well as numerous photographs from the era. { 417pp, 280x220mm, September 2005; PB, £41.50, 1552381145:9781552381144 , University of Calgary Press } |
| NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES IN MODERN LATIN AMERICA [Hendrik Kraay (ed)] This book explores some of the ways in which people define their membership in groups & their collective identity, as well as some of the challenges to the definition & maintenance of that identity. This interdisciplinary collection of essays, addressing such diverse topics as the history of Brazilian football & the concept of masculinity in the Mexican army, provides new insights into questions of identity in nineteenth- & twentieth-century Latin America. The essays cover a wide range of countries in the region, from Mexico to Argentina, & analyse a variety of identity-bearing groups, from small-scale communities to nations. Hendrik Kraay has gathered contributions from historians, anthropologists, & political scientists. Their individual methodological & theoretical approaches combine to paint a picture of Latin American society that is both complex & compelling. The chapters focus on what might be called the day-to-day construction of identity among ordinary people, from American nationals living in Peru to indigenous communities in Argentina. { 286pp, 155x230mm, September 2007; PB, £23.50, 155238229X:9781552382295 , University of Calgary Press } |
| OFF THE EDGE : Experiments in Cultural Analysis [Orvar Löfgren & Richard Wilk] Have you ever heard of the cream effect or witnessed the power of cultural backdraft? Have you watched the slow process of fossilisation or used the tactics of cultural stealth? You might be waiting for just the right word to describe what you have seen and done. This collection revitalises the study of the cultural processes of stability and change. The 25 essays invent new processes for a rapidly changing world. They illustrate how different perspectives enrich cultural analysis and add a bit of playfulness and experimentation to a longstanding academic issue. The authors -- from anthropology, European ethnology, sociology and cultural studies -- are peeking into blind spots and looking under the furniture in order to understand why and how some kinds of social life become visible, while so many others remain unseen. This book will inspire researchers and students to develop new approaches in cultural analysis. { 164pp, 170x250mm, November 2006; HB, £22.00, 8763505096:9788763505093 , Museum Tusculanum Press } |
| PAKISTAN STRATEGIC CULTURE & FOREIGN POLICY MAKING [Ijaz Khan] This book is to date the first and only study on Pakistan's foreign policy and decision-making process. It discusses the hows and whys of its policy as it has developed from a domestic to an international view. Post 9/11 changes required a fundamental change in self image and world view that went beyond the act of becoming a US ally in Afghanistan, or abandoning the policy of supporting the Taliban. The main topic of the study is identification of those changes, their requirements and some basic proposals for additional changes. The book also traces the historical, international and domestic context of Pakistan's Post 9/11 Afghan Policy. It analyses the regional impact of that decision, the domestic debate that it generated, and concludes with identification and implications for changes in Pakistan that are required for the sustenance of its new policies. { 152pp, 180x260mm, June 2007; HB, £52.99, 1600218334:9781600218330 , Nova Science Publishers } |
| SEPHARDIM OF SYDNEY : Coping with Political Processes & Social Pressures [Naomi Gale] The Sydney Jewish community is dynamic and vibrant, with many communal, social and religious institutions. This book investigates the Sephardic community of Sydney -- their history, their experiences as new immigrants in a host society after arriving from traditional Moslem cultures, as well as the changes they have undergone since they arrived in Australia. The Sephardic community comprises about 3,000 of the 40,000 Jews in Sydney, whose majority reside in the eastern suburbs, in Sydney's multicultural inner-city 'ethnic belt'. Although the Sephardim share some cultural features with the Jewish majority, there are substantial differences: they emphasise their cultural heterogeneity. Their experiences are viewed through the prism of their relationship to both the Ashkenazim and the larger Anglo-Australian society. Their inability to acculturate and assimilate into the Ashkenazi and Australian groups contributes profoundly to their poor self-image and to ethnic marginalisation. A negative ethnic identity and self-rejection, enhanced by rejection from the Ashkenazim and Australians, has a major impact on their everyday life and their perception of their social standing, especially on the younger Sephardic generation. This issue has been particularly relevant since 1988, when the Australian government moved to restrict Asian immigration. This became a media issue, with the Ashkenazim taking the side of white Australians and seeing themselves as superior to the Afro-Asian Jewish Sephardim, who are viewed as 'Asians' by both the Ashkenazim and the white majority. The result is a sense of 'double rejection', which pervades this group's political and social standing. REVIEW: "Provides valuable insights into the dynamics of the formation of Sephardic Jewish identity..." -- Professor C Kessler, The University of New South Wales. "A valuable study of the problems facing a migrant ethnical community arriving in Australia..." -- Professor R Gabby, The University of Western Australia. "A commendable example of ‘salvage ethnography'..." -- Professor S Deshen, Tel Aviv University. { 292pp, 152x229mm, April 2005; HB, £49.50, 1845190351:9781845190354 , Sussex Academic Press } |
| WHOLE TRUTH & NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH : A Dalit's Life [B Kesharshivam] Translated into English, this autobiography captures the chilling reality of a childhood spent playing with carcasses in a bonemeal factory, snatching coins from corpses in the cremation grounds, of being refused water at the village well and the various stages of a remarkable life. He reveals what modern India is like as it plunges along its path of economic growth. Pages { 307pp, 140x215mm, February 2008; PB, £11.99, 8185604878:9788185604879 , Stree } |
| UNAFFORDABLE NATION : Searching for a Decent Life in America [Jeffrey Jones JD PhD] The American dream used to mean that if you worked hard, saved money, and didn't spend extravagantly, you would be guaranteed a decent life. That article of faith is no more; it has been replaced by a growing fear that even two incomes will prove insufficient to afford a home in a good neighbourhood, a reliable vehicle, quality schools, healthcare, the means to care for ageing relatives, and the leisure to properly raise children. The middle class is waking up to the sobering realisation that the United States is fast becoming an unaffordable nation. Transcending ordinary politics, Jeffrey Jones addresses every member of the American community, not as liberal or conservative or as Democrat or Republican, but in the most basic and equal of terms: in their capacities as working persons dependent upon their occupations, their employers, and the government regulation of both to earn a decent living. He uncovers the profound moral consensus among Americans from every walk of life regarding the entitlements that should follow from individual hard work. Jones argues that regardless of political leanings, economic class, gender, and ethnic and racial differences, Americans remain united in the conviction that individuals who work hard should receive decent wages and other resources in return. He goes on to propose a "covenant on affordability", outlining the respective obligations of government, corporations, and individuals in ensuring a life that is affordable for every person who is willing to work hard. "The Unaffordable Nation" is a must-read for every American concerned about the decreasing value of his or her labour, alongside the rising costs of nearly everything. { 207pp, 140x215mm, July 2007; PB, £11.99, 159102515X:9781591025153 , Prometheus Books } |
| UNAFFORDABLE NATION : Searching for a Decent Life in America [Jeffrey Jones JD PhD] The American dream used to mean that if you worked hard, saved money, and didn't spend extravagantly, you would be guaranteed a decent life. That article of faith is no more; it has been replaced by a growing fear that even two incomes will prove insufficient to afford a home in a good neighbourhood, a reliable vehicle, quality schools, healthcare, the means to care for ageing relatives, and the leisure to properly raise children. The middle class is waking up to the sobering realisation that the United States is fast becoming an unaffordable nation. Transcending ordinary politics, Jeffrey Jones addresses every member of the American community, not as liberal or conservative or as Democrat or Republican, but in the most basic and equal of terms: in their capacities as working persons dependent upon their occupations, their employers, and the government regulation of both to earn a decent living. He uncovers the profound moral consensus among Americans from every walk of life regarding the entitlements that should follow from individual hard work. Jones argues that regardless of political leanings, economic class, gender, and ethnic and racial differences, Americans remain united in the conviction that individuals who work hard should receive decent wages and other resources in return. He goes on to propose a "covenant on affordability", outlining the respective obligations of government, corporations, and individuals in ensuring a life that is affordable for every person who is willing to work hard. "The Unaffordable Nation" is a must-read for every American concerned about the decreasing value of his or her labour, alongside the rising costs of nearly everything. { 207pp, 140x215mm, July 2007; PB, £11.99, 159102515X:9781591025153 , Prometheus Books } |
| VENOMOUS TOUCH : Notes on Caste, Culture & Politics [Ravikumar] These irreverent and provocative essays on caste, culture and political icons offer a new way of understanding modern India and the future. { 250pp, 140x215mm, October 2008; PB, £25.00, 818560486X:9788185604862 , Stree } |
| WHOLE TRUTH & NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH : A Dalit's Life [B Kesharshivam] Translated into English, this autobiography captures the chilling reality of a childhood spent playing with carcasses in a bonemeal factory, snatching coins from corpses in the cremation grounds, of being refused water at the village well and the various stages of a remarkable life. He reveals what modern India is like as it plunges along its path of economic growth. Pages { 307pp, 140x215mm, February 2008; PB, £11.99, 8185604878:9788185604879 , Stree } |